hey look at this thing i made: IV

I'm kind of absent minded at times. The general way I live my life is to say, I got a plan, I'm wingin' it. It's kind of the Evel Knievel approach, not quite though. It's not as though I make the conscious decision to wait till the night before it's due to start on a school project, it's just that, I'm kind of absent minded at times. This is how I end up in situations like sunday the 19th, sitting around realizing that I had less than a week to get my mom a birthday present. Luckily, I had a plan.

I was wingin' it.

My general strategy for choosing a gift for someone is this: First I take a mental stock of everything I know about this person. I then break that down in more detail and try and find a need. To me, the best present is something that I think someone would really love, but would never buy for themselves. Being, as I am, gainfully employed, I can usually buy anything that I want for myself (given a long enough timeline). However, there are plenty of things that I would probably love to have, but would never buy for myself. A great example of this sort of gift is when I bought my parents a TiVo a few years back. After having digital cable myself, I had been pitching the idea to them for awhile that they would love some sort of DVR capability. They never sprang for it though, so for christmas I bought them a TiVo and a year of service. They loved it as much as I thought they would.

I tragically had no such epiphanies this time (not that a week would have been long enough to arrange something). So it was back to the plan. If I couldn't come up with something that she wouldn't buy, then the next logical step would be something she, couldn't buy. You may have noticed that I've been on a making things kick. So,

Medium: Stained glass

The Image: THE Michigan State University S. This was the image I used (minus the state at the bottom):

I'm still developing my stained glass process, but typically step one is to make the pattern. This is done for two reasons. The first is it lets me get a color scheme down on paper so I know how many different colors of glass I'll need to buy. The second is it gives me an idea of the amount of any individual color I'll need. I think I mentioned before that the stained glass I buy usually comes in 12" x 12" squares. When I have the pattern made and cut up it's much easier to see how many square feet I'll need. I didn't feel that was as necessary this time because I had the idea in my mind that this wouldn't be much bigger than a sheet of paper. If I kept to that pattern than the S would be small enough that one sheet of glass would have enough area for it while still having some left over in case of mistakes. I felt there was a decent chance that I would only need one sheet of glass for the "background" as well, but it hardly seemed worth the risk.

Going into the glass aisle at Hobby Lobby I was still undecided about what color the S would be. Of course once I actually looked at the glass it was a pretty easy decision. The white I was going to go with was opaque, so if it made up the majority of the piece then not too much light would get through. That struck me as not really being in line with the idea of a stained glass window. I originally was planning on going with only one shade of green as that seemed like it would make a more traditional look (in terms of the logo that is), however they only had one sheet of the shade of green I wanted, so I was forced to get two different ones that were as close in color as possible.

Next I needed to continue my ongoing quest to find the perfect material for making patterns. I was wandering the aisles and I came upon some foam stuff. It seemed pretty good, it was fairly sturdy while seeming to have some give AND the label claimed it was easy to glue (SPOILER: it was not).

Back at home I went through the pattern-making set up. Medium to table, then carbon paper, then whatever my base picture is (and sometimes tracing paper, if I want to save the initial picture). This was where the first problem with the foam showed up (that's called foreshadowing). Carbon paper wouldn't transfer onto it. Hrn. Well, luckily there was only one shape that I was transferring from the initial picture and it was pretty simple. After cutting it out and taping it to the foam, I just traced around the S. Looked like this:

The breaks in the lines are where the tape was. Next up was to break it up into the individual sections. Having a bit of stained glass work under my belt at this point, I've begun to put a lot more thought into how I break a pattern up. For example:

In the past I probably would have been tempted to do the circled section as one piece. The problem is that makes a piece with a really awkward angle that would be hard to cut/grind correctly. It makes far more sense to divide it up into a rectangle and a triangle, note that section once I had finished the initial pattern.

I tried to use more continuous lines (example: the way the straight lines in the middle of the S are the edge for five different pieces). This makes the soldering process approximately one thousand times easier. Also, triangles tend to be the bane of my existence, so I tried to use them sparingly. With the piece structure set it was time to pick a color layout. The actual S was easy as it would be all white. When filling in the background, since I only had two shades I wanted to make sure that it alternated. So in the final color scheme the only time two greens of the same shade touch is the section I had highlighted above (the triangle rectangle dealy). Of course since I decided this after I had drawn the pattern, I ended up with an odd number of pieces. If you look at the piece just below the upper left you'll see that I had to split it in half to make sure the colors alternated right.

The pieces were also numbered in a way that I felt would make it easy to reassemble it without looking back at the picture. Notice how the 3 looks like a w and the g1 *could* be mistaken for a sixteen or some other number (that might also be foreshadowing). All that was left was to get out the pattern shears and goto town.

Then a disaster happened.

I've begun using 3M 77 as my glue of choice for putting patterns on glass. So I got all the white pieces laid out next to the glass and sprayed a good layer. The foam instantly curled. Fuck. Tragically as El Fuego would say, I was in too deep and had to power through. So I put the pieces on the glass hoping they would be sticky enough to flatten out. They weren't. Fuck. All that was left was to put another sheet of glass on top with a weight to flatten them out and hopefully they would dry fine (they didn't). Remembering the claim that this foam was easy to glue I decided to try doing some pieces with rubber cement. It stood to reason that they probably didn't mean 3M 77 when talking about gluing. Upon putting the rubber cement on, the foam instantly curled and I had the exact same problem as before. Fuck. I was kind of in a bind here. As you might recall I was on a deadline and didn't relish the thought of remaking the pattern from scratch, but at the same time I was at a loss as to how I was going to get the pattern on the glass. On a previous project (that you have yet to see) after I broke a piece that had already been cut, I just traced it onto another piece of glass and just hoped the sharpie would hold up well enough to the grinding. It worked pretty well and given that I was out options I decided to try it here. Worked pretty well.

I did all of g2 that first day, but I had used the other sheet of green to try and save the white pattern so that was the limit of what I could do that first day. The next day I checked to see if the white pattern had dried ok, which, as you know, it didn't. At this point I was so happy with how the trace plan had gone I didn't even care. The backs of the white pieces were crazy sticky though and I couldn't get them clean at all which made putting them on the glass "correctly" hard. I ended up just putting them on sticky side up and tracing them that way, which was fine (OR WAS IT!?!).

With all the pieces cut out I laid them all out to see if any additional grinding needed to be done. I was perplexed to find that there was no number three. Huh, well, keep going I guess. Oddly enough after laying out the rest of the pieces there was a left over piece of white. I'm at a total loss as to how it happened since it was clearly labeled 3 g1, but like I always say: "in the stained glass business, you gotta roll with the punches." Tragically the only green I had left that was big enough to cut this on was the g2 shade, this meant there would be three g2s in a row. At least that wasn't the worst thing to happen here. The worst thing was that since this was sticky I did the aforementioned reverse technique. Now this worked fine before because the glass was the same on both sides. Not the case with the g2 shade, of course that didn't occur to me at the time. God. Damnit. At this point I didn't have enough glass left to cut a whole new piece, which meant I had to try and salvage this. It actually worked out ok, I ended up just splitting off a corner and just re-cutting that. With it finally all laid out, I was pretty happy with how it looked.

This was when hanging considerations came into play. On the first two pieces I did (which, again, you haven't seen the second) I didn't put much concern with how they would be hung up, planning, as I was, to wing it. With this piece however, it needed to be delivered as a final product. I didn't much like the idea of soldering loops on the side (which is what my book recommends). Suction cups seemed like a tech idea, but I wasn't really sure how to affix them. I ended up drilling a hole in a test piece of glass to see if I could force a suction cup through and have it stay. Worked out pretty well. Back on the main piece I got all the corner pieces together, made a little mark about where I wanted the holes and went and drilled.

Next in the stained glass process is a good washing to get the off any residual glass dust or any other thing that might keep the copper foil from sticking. The copper foil is essentially copper tape, it's almost identical the silver tape that's often used in sealing ducts (not to be confused with duct tape). The idea is that after applying flux to it, you can use a soldering iron to melt some 60/40 solder on and when it hardens it will form a frame to hold the glass pieces in place. All foiled out it looks like this:

And then when you put the solder on, it looks like this:

A quick reversal and solder job on the other side and it was time to do the sides. The sides are a tricky thing. With any of the inner seams there isn't much of a risk of the solder coated copper foil coming up because it's reinforced between two pieces. With the edge you don't have that luxury. All you can really do is try and be really careful and get a good even bead around the edge. The process for that is a little different as you need to turn the piece on it's side so you can solder right on to it as opposed to trying to hit it from the side.

And to think, you all laughed at me for keeping two PS2s. With all the soldering done all that was left was to wash it to remove any leftover flux, bits of solder and residual marker. Then I used some finishing compound to give it a nice shine, put the suction cups in and we were good to go.

Now THAT'S how you make a stained glass Michigan State S. I was pretty delighted with how it turned out and I wasn't the only one. Of course since this was a gift there was a crucial final step.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOOOOO YOUUUUUUUU

Until next time space cowboys.

Note: Starting with this project and with all future projects I'm attempting to over-document the process. I'm not always good at remembering to take pictures, but they will all be uploaded to a gallery and there will be a link at the bottom of the post, kind of like this one.